The (Un)Making of a ‘Model Minority’

Notes from America with Kai Wright

WNYC Studios

News Commentary, Politics, History, News

4.4 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 4 January 2021

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

An odd racial pecking order puts Indian Americans in a curious place -- outside of whiteness, but distinct from other people of color. How’d that come to be? And is it changing? We explore these questions by revisiting a story from Arun Venugopal, senior reporter with WNYC’s Race & Justice Unit, about how a Kansan community grappled with one of the first widely reported hate crimes following the 2016 election. Then he joins us to check in on that community today and walk through the history of the “model minority” myth -- and how perceptions may or may not be about to change, yet again. Most recently, Venugopal penned “The Truth Behind Indian American Exceptionalism” for the January/February 2021 issue of The Atlantic. COMPANION LISTENING: “White Like Me” (10/20/2016) A history of what it means -- and has meant -- to be white in the United States of America, and what that meant for the 2016 election. “A Secret Meeting in South Bend” (6/18/2020) How a group of Black families in the mid 20th Century carved out a neighborhood for themselves, and tried to make their American Dreams real, despite the terrorism of Jim Crow. “The United States of Anxiety” airs live on Sunday evenings at 6pm ET. The podcast episodes are lightly edited from our live broadcasts. To catch all the action, tune into the show on Sunday nights via the stream on WNYC.org/anxiety or tell your smart speakers to play WNYC.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the United States of Anxiety, a show about the unfinished business of our history and its grip on our future.
0:08.0	I'm raising a brown boy who may someday wear a turban as part of his faith in a country that is more dangerous than the one that I was given.
0:14.7	It's a moral dilemma. Are you going to declare that you're a person of color, or do you aspire to be an honorary
0:21.2	white? Or do you just get excluded as a perpetual for.
0:24.4	I'm proud to be a Chinese man. I'm proud to stand with my black sisters and brothers as we stand
0:30.4	up for their lives. We cannot have all lives matter until black lives matter.
0:36.4	We are the taxi drivers.
0:37.6	We are the 7-Eleven workers.
0:39.2	We are the doctors, the engineers, the lawyers.
0:41.0	We are everything and everywhere. so this idea of the model
0:44.7	minority in this wedge is a myth it has nothing to do with the fact that we're both
0:48.8	minorities but it does have everything to do with the fact that we are not
0:52.1	white does have everything to do with the fact that we are not quite.
0:57.0	Welcome to the show, I'm Kay Wright and I am joined this week by my colleague Arun Vinicopala.
1:02.0	Hey, Roon. Hey, Roon. Hey, Hey Roon. Hey Kai, good to be here. So Arun is a senior
1:07.0	reporter in WNYC's Race and Justice Unit and longtime listeners of this
1:12.3	program will recognize Arun as one of our
1:14.7	founders. He was the lead reporter in the first season of our podcast back when we
1:19.3	were babies. Yes, there's days of innocence.
1:22.6	Well, the not so innocent days
1:24.2	before Donald Trump, right?
1:25.4	Was elected president that, you know.
	...

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